A Household Word: The Grass Is Always Greener

My dirt was malnourished, vitamin deprived and sickly. Who knew lawns need to eat? I felt like a bad parent.

By Carol Band

Like many urban hipsters, when we had our first baby, my husband and I decided that our child needed certain things that city life simply couldn’t provide – things like a school system that would  foster his obvious giftedness and a yard where he could safely frolic and sample fistfuls of dirt. So we moved out of our one-bedroom apartment and into a four-bedroom Victorian with a tiny yard, in a town that we hoped would combine easy access to the city with all the advantages of suburban life.



Turns out that suburban life, even in neighborhoods with tiny yards, involves lawn care. It also turns out that while I have absolutely no interest or experience in this area, my husband Harris has even less. Consequently, the “lawn” has become my turf.

For years, I’ve rationalized the profusion of weeds by saying that only boring suburbanites agonize over crabgrass; that plush, green lawns aren’t politically correct. And, although I knew that Al Gore would approve of my organic weeds, I knew my neighbors did not.

Oh, they didn’t come right out and say “Your lawn sucks”; they disguised their disgust by offering up neighborly advice.

“Crabgrass means you’re not watering enough,” said the woman whose velvety back yard abuts mine.

“At least it’s green,” I’d reply.

“My brother-in-law has a landscaping business,” the neighbor across the street hinted. “Here’s his card.”

Frankly, the pressure was getting to me. So, last Saturday, I ripped up what I once considered to be perfectly good crabgrass in the quest for lawn perfection.

What I found was grubs – lots of grubs. In fact, my yard had enough writhing larvae to keep Fear Factor on the air indefinitely. Why does my soil look like it was smote by a Biblical plague, while my neighbors’ lawns are green and pest-free? According to the guy at the hardware store, the answer is chemicals. Of course, when my kids were little and regularly ingesting significant amounts of yard, using any type of pesticide would have been out of the question. But, now that they are older and stay indoors, safely basking in the glow of the Xbox 360, perhaps a little diazinon wouldn’t hurt.

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